Date: Mon, 18 Mar 1996 17:53:24 -0600 From: "Richard D. Mohr" ________________________________________________________________________ "'Pleasure and the Black Masseur'" by Richard D. Mohr (February 29, 1996, _Bay Windows_) At OutWrite, Boston's annual altar call to political correctness, black boots were the footwear of choice. Docs on dykes, engineers on transsexuals, shitkickers on bears all incongruously padded the Park Plaza's Victorian broadloom. There were black boots by the hundreds, but only one bootblack. And he got no business -- no business but mine. For, you see, he was black. In the erotics of bootshine, to hire his livery would be to engage in an un-white slave trade -- or so it p.c.-ly goes. I disregarded conferees' stares as I mounted the hotel's oak throne of a shoe-stand with its brass stirrups towering above the marshalled tools of the trade. First comes the soaping -- a gentle modeling of the foot, the tactile equivalent to caramel. A daubing of residues follows. Then the first round of polish is worked in with cloth bound around fingers which any masseur would envy. My toes involuntarily relax, mirroring in reverse the curling of toes at orgasm. Then the brush blocks fly, their soft whir inviting slumber. Rags buff, and the cycle repeats -- this time with mist, EPA spit substitute. But the EPA has apparently not twigged to bootblack itself -- that inky waxy emulsion from which the shiner's craft takes its name and whose solvents swabbed on sole edges are poppers to the leather gods. A whelm of scents -- waxes, hides, ethers -- completes the synaesthesia and prompts ecstacy. Had OutWrite's literary types ever read Tennessee William's story "Pleasure and Black Masseur," they would know that sexual acts need not entail sexual orientations and that racial aesthetics can grace erotics without entailing racial orientations. But as things stood, I tipped the bootblack princely for I knew that political correctness had made it likely his family would not be eating well that week. ___________________________ Richard D. Mohr audited OutWrite '96 on a return trip from lecturing at Dartmouth College.